La Normandie : projet de carton pour la tapisserie de la manufacture des Gobelins. Étude 8 - Encre sur papier

Original ink drawing, with several ink sketches on the verso, on a sheet folded in half.
Stamp signature of the artist in the lower right corner of the work, and workshop stamp signature on the verso.
Louis Anquetin, thanks to his friendship with art critic Gustave Geoffroy who was appointed administrator of the National Manufactories, obtained three commissions for cartoons for the Gobelins, "Bourgogne" in 1911, a carpet "Les cygnes", and in 1912 "La Normandie", tapestry.
Very fine condition.
Provenance: artist's studio, referenced in the catalogue Atelier Louis Anquetin (Thierry de Maigret, 28/11/08).
Louis Anquetin, born in Étrépagny in 1861 and died in Paris in 1932, is an important French painter.
He began his career alongside avant-garde painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. With Émile Bernard, he was the inventor of Cloisonnism.
From 1884 to 1893, Louis Anquetin continuously explored the new possibilities offered by the liberation introduced by Impressionism in French painting.
From 1893, following a long confrontation with the "masters of the past," he adopted a pictorial stance that would put him on the margins of the general art movement, and distance him from his friends.
Dazzled by Baroque art and its creative vigor, he then thought that his youthful friends had embarked on a path that would lead to the death of painting. He believed in a "perfect painting" embodied in the remembrance of the lessons of Michelangelo and Rubens in particular. His work therefore became more classical; he advocated a return to craftsmanship, proposing to reflect on the a priori conditions of any possible form of art in respect of the rules of perspective and anatomy, as practiced by the masters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Leaving only a few works that can be qualified as monumental, Anquetin proved prolific through his numerous studies and sketches, he who considered that drawing was "an all-powerful means of expression," the obligatory foundation of all plastic arts.
By deliberately working against his time, Louis Anquetin made possible the existence of an original modern figuration. Through his obstinacy and passion for painting, he indeed prevented the path of the great Western tradition from being totally blocked.
His works can be admired in numerous and prestigious museums such as the Musée d'Orsay or the Louvre in Paris, in San Francisco or Detroit, at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, at the National Gallery and Tate in London, etc.